 In 1979, Cuba was chosen as the host country for the sixth summit of the non-aligned movement with Fidel Castro as its chairperson. After the United Nations, the non-aligned movement is the largest organization of countries that represents the interests of over 55% of the world's population. And in many ways, this summit marked the zenith of Fidel Castro's prestige among developing countries. Cuba's diplomatic success in the 1970s derived in part from the 1974 military coup in Portugal that led to the independence of Angola in 1975. When Angolan President Agostino Neto appealed to Cuba for military aid in 1975, Fidel Castro responded immediately by sending Cuban troops, doctors, and teachers. Between 1975 and 1991, Cuban teachers educated over 2 million Angolans, and Cuba granted thousands of scholarships to Angolans to study at Cuba's Isla de la Juventud, an island dedicated to the education of students from socialist countries. In March 1987 and June 1988 at the Battle of Quito, Cuba and Angolan soldiers together fought against the South African Defense Forces and forced South Africa to relinquish its control over southern Angola and accept the independence of Namibia. Cuba sent more troops proportionate to its population than the United States deployed in Vietnam. One of the striking features of Cuban intervention in Angola was the disparity between its size and the key role that it played in a large African country. The life story of Fidel Castro is not the story of the leader of a poor, underdeveloped nation struggling against the fierce opposition of the United States. It would also be inaccurate to view Fidel Castro simply as a Soviet stooge. During the Cold War, Fidel Castro very cleverly manipulated opportunities to project his leadership in many struggles against imperialism. Fidel Castro supported many African leaders, but Cuba's greatest contribution was in Angola. The Angolan Civil War, which took place on a Cold War stage, was one of the longest and bloodiest conflicts of the 20th century. Let's briefly review the colonial history of Angola because the roots of the Angolan Civil War lie in the country's independence from Portugal. Angola is a large country in southwestern Africa. It is about twice the size of Texas. Angola has a long coastline, approximately 1,000 miles, with four major ports, several natural resources including diamond mines, and it is the second largest producer of oil after Nigeria in Africa. Angola shares borders with Namibia to the south, Zambia to the east, and the Democratic Republic of Congo to the north. The Cabinda province, which is the largest oil production area in Angola, is separated from the rest of the country by the Democratic Republic of Congo. Angola's contemporary political boundaries resulted from Portuguese colonialism. Much of the territory that comprises present-day Angola was part of the Kingdom of Congo, which rose to prominence in the 14th century. The Portuguese colony of Angola grew out of a trading post set up by Portuguese explorers in the 15th century at Soho in the north. In 1575, Paulo de Asdenovais came with 100 Portuguese settler families and 400 soldiers and established a settlement on the coast called São Paulo de Luanda. Another Portuguese settlement called Benguela was founded as a fort in 1587 and became a town in 1617. Very early on the Portuguese succeeded in converting the king and his son Afonso to Christianity. The Portuguese profited from the transatlantic slave trade which became the colony's economic foundation for the next four centuries when millions of slaves were shipped to Brazil and the Caribbean. The transatlantic slave trade officially ended in the 1830s after Brazilian independence but slavery continued in Portuguese colonies until the end of the 19th century and in a disguised form until the early 20th century. In Angola, a Lusso African population and culture developed around the colonial settlements of Luanda and Benguela. The expansion of the Portuguese colonial state into the interior occurred intermittently until the end of the 19th century when Portuguese authorities initiated a series of wars of conquest and developed an economy of resource extraction. The Portuguese took full control of Angola's economy. For 400 years the Portuguese were heavily involved in the slave trade. After the slave trade ended, through the export of rubber, diamonds, coffee and then oil, the Portuguese developed an economy that enriched Portugal at the expense of Angolans. After 1926, the fascist government set up labour camps near the coffee and cotton plantations where forced labour became the new form of slavery. The Portuguese used several brutal methods and strategies to subjugate Angolans and ruined their social networks. They reorganized villages and established transportation routes that facilitated exports while at the same time dividing communities. This colonial rule allowed and at times encouraged interracial marriage, but there was a distinct separation of population groups according to racial background. Mestizos or people of mixed European and African ancestry were sometimes given access to more education. Africans who were considered assimilated into Portuguese culture and values were sent to Portugal for higher education, but were prevented from returning to Africa for fear of political change. Portuguese was the language of instruction since the establishment of the first Jesuit primary school in 1605. In 1921 the Portuguese forbade by decree the use of African languages in the schools. In the 1940s, Roman Catholic missions and their schools became the official representatives of the state in Africa. The mission schools were designed to create a small but powerful educated elite group that would support the colonial regime. In rural areas, the Portuguese created the Department of Native Affairs and established adaptation schools run by Catholic missionaries. A great majority of Africans remained illiterate because of the high dropout rates in these adaptation schools. The first national movement against Portuguese colonial power started in 1961. Portugal responded by sending in thousands of army troops who killed tens of thousands of Angolans. Many nationalists fled to surrounding countries and in time organized into three main guerrilla groups, the MPLA, the FNLA and UNITA. On April 25, 1974, a military coup in Portugal toppled the fascist government. This event is also called the Carnation Revolution because it was a peaceful and bloodless revolution. April 25 is a national holiday in Portugal, it is Freedom Day, and one of the goals of the Carnation Revolution was to end Portuguese colonization in Africa. Soon after the 1974 military coup in Portugal, representatives of the new Portuguese government met with the MPLA, FNLA and UNITA and signed the ALVOR agreement that granted Angolan independence and provided for a transitional three-way power-sharing government. However, trust quickly broke among these groups and that led to a bloody civil war and foreign intervention. Let's take a quick look at each of these liberation movements. The popular movement for the liberation of Angola or the MPLA was founded in 1956 and it was the oldest of the three groups. The socialist movement was based in the capital city of Luanda and it was largely coastal and urban. The MPLA controlled the oil wells in the north and much of the MPLA's funding came from oil profits during the 1980s. Their Marxist leader, Augustino Neto, is perhaps the biggest national hero in Angola. He was a physician, a poet and a political leader. To this day, his image is printed on the Angolan Kwanzaa banknotes. Neto studied medicine in Portugal and he returned to Angola in 1959 and joined the MPLA. He wrote his first volume of poetry at that time using liberation and freedom as the theme. He was arrested a year later and deported to Portugal. He managed to escape and came to the United States and appealed to the US government for support in his fight for Angolan independence. The Kennedy administration turned him down. In 1965, Neto met with Che Guevara in Cuba and created an alliance with Fidel Castro. Neto also developed a close relationship with the Soviet Union and he was awarded the Soviet Union's Lenin Peace Prize in 1975. When Angola gained independence in 1975, Neto became the first president but soon after independence a civil war broke out and Neto died in 1979 in Moscow during a surgery at the age of 56. The National Front for the Liberation of Angola or the FNLA appeared in 1962 as a separatist movement in northern Angola. The FNLA was led by Holden Roberto and the group was based in northern Angola and had close ties to the US ally Mobutu Sessicco in Zyre. The MPLA crushed the FNLA and most of its leaders were either exiled or killed. The remnants of the group merged with UNITA in 1975 as part of the alternative government. The National Union for the Total Independence of Angola or UNITA was formed in 1966 and led by Jonas Savimbi. It was populist in nature and its leaders formed a second government at Wombo in central Angola. UNITA controlled much of the country's agriculture and waved the banner of rural right-wing resistance. Jonas Savimbi was a master in guerrilla warfare and an excellent military strategist. Both the United States and South Africa launched separate covert operations to funnel aid and weapons to the FNLA and UNITA. Many of their fighters lacked boots and basic military gear. Although some units had waged guerrilla warfare against the Portuguese, none of them had experience in the conventional warfare that was needed to seize land from the MPLA. The allies realized that a support role alone would not be enough. They would have to take the lead, deploying regular troops under their own command. In 1975, the Vietnam War was just drawing to an end and there was no public support in the United States for another American intervention in a foreign country. Notes from a 1975 National Security Council meeting at the White House during the Nixon presidency show that senior US officials discussed how they could support the FNLA through Mobutu Sesiseko Inzaya. Both President Reagan and President Bush hosted UNITA leader Jonas Savimbi at the White House, despite the fact that UNITA was known to traffic in conflict diamonds, conscript child soldiers and torture dissenters. America's political alignment with the apartheid regime in South Africa remains a black spot in US history. Even as late as 1986, President Reagan vetoed the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act. As I said earlier, starting in November 1975, Fidel Castro sent troops to defend the MPLA from South African troops crossing the border at Namibia. President Carlotta, named after a Cuban slave who led an uprising in 1843, initiated a struggle against South Africa that lasted until 1991 with the withdrawal of the last Cuban troops. During the Angolan Civil War, the United States and the Soviet Union enjoyed a brief thaw in their relations in an era referred to as daytime. When Cuba sent troops to Angola, the United States blamed the Soviet Union for breaking the rules of daytime because they believed that Cuba had intervened in Angola as a Soviet proxy. That was not the case. Fidel Castro was not prepared to allow detente with the United States to detract from his objective of alliance building in developing nations. And today most historians agree that Fidel Castro's decision to send troops to Angola was taken without consulting with the Soviet Union. Che Guevara started working with the MPLA in 1965 and Fidel Castro himself strongly identified with the Angolan struggle. The main battleground was Quito Kuanawal, a small town in southeastern Angola where South Africa was training, supplying and directing UNITA forces. The Cubans forced the apartheid regime to fight a costly war of attrition. The battle of Quito Kuanawal was the largest military confrontation in Africa after the end of World War II. Angola was ravaged by violence. The siege dragged on and the Cuban deployment of troops kept increasing. This was an enormous commitment for a small country like Cuba with a small population and limited resources. The military operation was extremely dangerous with fears over the nuclear capacities of the South African regime. Cuban soldiers often moved at night in small columns to avoid detection. They constructed an airstrip that allowed Cuban pilots to bomb an area that provided essential supplies for the South African defense force. And this demonstrated Cuban air power. Less than a year after Quito Kuanawal, delegations from Angola, South Africa and Cuba met at the UN headquarters to sign the tripartite accord. This was a remarkable diplomatic accomplishment for Cuba and Angola because it granted Namibia independence and provided for the withdrawal of South African troops from Angola. The last Cuban military units also left Angola in 1991. This brief period of peace was shattered in September 1992, when Unitar leader Jonas Savimbi refused to accept the MPLA leader Jose Eduardo dos Santos as president of Angola. Not conflict presumed. In May 1993, the United States officially recognized the dos Santos government and stopped supporting Unitar. A new peace agreement called the Lusaka Protocol was signed between dos Santos and Savimbi in November 1994, but sporadic fighting continued. Both sides engaged in scorched earth offensives, siege warfare and other tactics that primarily targeted civilians. By 1999, there were approximately 10 million landmines in the country. An Angola topped UNICEF's Child Risk Index, which measures the risk of death, malnutrition, abuse and development failure for children around the world. In 2002, government forces killed Jonas Savimbi and soon after that, Unitar signed a ceasefire agreement that ended the armed conflict and paved the way for democratic elections. Cuba under Fidel Castro became a model for anti-imperialist struggles. Castro's speeches about social justice, international debt, neo-imperialism and globalization resonated in the non-aligned movement. Fidel Castro articulated socialism as an egalitarian philosophy that revolved around the concept of a welfare state. Here's a clip from Democracy Now about Cuban intervention in Angola. You know it's interesting, Amy, because there was a special relationship that existed between the Cuban Revolution in Africa from almost the beginning. The Cubans were very supportive of the Algerian struggle against the French, which succeeded in 1962. They went on to support the various anti-colonial movements in Africa, including and particularly the anti-Portuguese movements in Guinea-Bissau, Angola and Mozambique. They were unquestioning in their support for the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa. It's the Angolan struggle that receives a lot of attention. One of the things that was not understood at the time by many of us in the United States, including many of us on the left, was that when Cuban troops went to Angola, they did not go at the behest of the Soviet Union. In fact, the Soviet Union was not in favor of Cuban troops going there. The Cubans went there out of a sense of solidarity. I mean, they actually believed in solidarity. They went there to stop the invasion that was in the process of taking place by the South African apartheid troops and their allies in the FNLA and UNITA. This relationship has been very, very strong, and you could tell in the words of the late President Mandela that this bond, this love for the Cuban people and for the Cuban revolution, that bond also translated into a feeling in Black America of a certain kind of bond, a certain support for the Cuban revolution, feeling that this was a revolution that paid attention to Africa, but also paid attention to the struggle around racism within Cuba. Although, obviously, there were certain limitations to that, but I would say that Cuba probably made the greatest advances in the struggle around racism of any country in the Western Hemisphere. To turn to Cuba's role in Angola, this is a clip from the 2001 documentary Fidel, The Untold Story. That was directed by Estella Bravo. You hear the narrator of Lost of Rana first. Right from the beginning, Cuba's revolutionary ideals not only spread throughout Latin America, but also forged strong ties with national liberation leaders such as Seguro Turei, Amelcar Cabral, Julius Niere, Zamora Mashel, and Agostino Neto. When the regular South African troops invaded Angola, we couldn't stand by and do nothing. When the MPLA asked for our help, we offered them the help they needed. In 1975, as Angola moved towards independence from Portugal, the CIA, along with the apartheid government of South Africa, tried to bring down a new Angolan government. With the request of the Angolan president, Fidel sent 36,000 troops to keep the South African forces from attacking Luanda, the capital. For many Cubans whose ancestors were African slaves, the fight in Angola was a way to repair a debt to history. In 14 years of war, over 300,000 Cubans, doctors, teachers, and engineers as well as soldiers, played an important role in Angola. That's a clip from the 2001 documentary, Fidel, The Untold Story, directed by Estella Bravo. Now let's go to the films CIA and Angolan Revolution. In this clip, former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger explains why the US was concerned about the Cuban troops that Fidel Castro had sent to fight in Angola. Mr. Kissinger, you hear Fidel Castro himself. It was a question of globalizing our struggle vis-à-vis the globalized pressures and harassment of the US. In this respect, it did not coincide with the Soviet viewpoint. We acted, but without their cooperation, quite the opposite. Cut from the film CIA and Angolan Revolution, Bill Fletcher as we wrap up the section on Cuba in Africa. There's a story that I heard, Amy, about what happened in Angola on the night of independence, and there was panic in the capital. South African troops and their allies were approaching, and no one knew what was going to happen. And then at midnight, people went down to the docks. And out of the darkness came Cuban troops, Cuban ships, that then landed troops. And the look on the face of the person who told me the story, who witnessed this, was something that I'll never forget, the sense that they had been saved at a critical moment in an act that had not been driven by the Soviet Union, but had been driven by a belief in solidarity and a particular relationship between Cuba and Africa. And that's something that the US mainstream media is completely ignoring at this moment. And Che Guevara would be in Africa fighting for leading Cuban forces before he would ultimately die in Latin America. That's correct. The Democratic Republic of the Congo and was fighting a neo-colonial regime that, ironically, he was working with Cabela, Laurent Cabela in the beginning. But the forces there were very poorly organized. They weren't really ready to carry out a revolution. And the Cuban advisors withdrew ultimately because the conditions were not right. Speaking about Che, I thought I would turn right now to Che Guevara. I want to turn to another clip from the film Fidel, The Untold Story, directed by Estela Bravo. This is Fidel Castro talking about Che Guevara following his execution in Bolivia in 1967. If we want a model of a man who belongs not to our time, but to the future, I would say with all my heart that that model is Che. In 1997, three decades after he was killed, Che Guevara's remains were found in return to Cuba. Fidel Castro talked more about him in the film Fidel. I dream about him often. I dream that I'm talking to him, that he's alive. It's a very special thing. It's hard to accept the fact that he's dead. Why is that? I'd say it's because he's always present. Always present everywhere. I hope you enjoyed watching this video. Please feel free to post your comments below. Thank you.